Electronic mail or email transmits texts and documents over networks in an ever increasing communication role. From its early inception as a teletype messaging system across Arapanet in the 1970's, email has emerged as a global messaging system over both the Internet and intranets, playing a vital role in business and personal life, so that individuals now routinely use email for both personal convenience and business productivity.
Some emails are sent with errors. Other emails are sent prematurely by accidental user activation of the send button before composition is complete. Occasionally, the information contained in an email changes after the email is sent. The present solution to each of these problems is to send a new email with the corrected or updated information. Creating a second email adds to storage space demand, as well as the composer's time to create a new message. Therefore, a need arises for a method and apparatus that would enable a sent email to be updated by the originator without the need to compose and send a new email with duplicative content.
Updating a sent email requires overcoming problems in the area of editing the email, avoiding duplicative content, and linking the update to an email that has already been opened.
U.S. Patent Application 2002/0078104 (the '104 publication) discloses a method and system for managing documents that includes editing prior emails. An email identification is placed on a business email that is passed to the document management system where the email is opened to a plurality of users in an editable form for updating. The system traces and manages the updating of the document information. The '104 application does not provide for updating email message content by the sender.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,745,197 (the '197 patent) discloses a method for avoiding duplicate content in subsequent emails. The '197 patent system and method stores messages in folders or archives identified by a user account within the message database. Selected information about messages is extracted into a master array. The master array is processed to identify topics which occur only once and identify them as unique. Duplicate and near-duplicate messages are removed and unique messages are stored.
U.S. Patent Application 2002/0073157 (the '157 publication) discloses a method for linking prior emails by creating an email thread as a single readable document in which extraneous material has been removed, and the individual messages interlinked.
While emails can be canceled after they are sent, present email tools do not update, or modify an email after it is sent. There is currently no tool that updates or modifies an email when a user inadvertently sends an email before completing, proofreading, or attaching intended documents.